Our eight marketing strategies for small startup companies with slim budgets emphasize time spent over dollars lost. Spending big bucks on a national media campaign isn’t necessary to have a profitable company. Owners using these tips need to put the time in to have success.

Build Out Your Social Media Profiles

Getting as many eyes on your business as possible is vital for it to sustain any early success. Creating profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram and LinkedIn won’t cost a dime and gives you access to millions of potential fans and customers. Build these profiles — all of them — and do not neglect them. That means you’ll need to devote time (at least an hour) each day to interact with people, comment on content outside your company and post your own interesting stuff.

Return on investment from social media is notoriously difficult to nail down, but assigning values to your likes and contact form fills is possible. Integrating (free) Google Analytics on your website can help you track the visitors to your company’s main website from your social portals.

Bottom Line: Social media is not a space for you to beat the constant drum about why people should buy your products or services. For every post or tweet about your company, include 10 more offerings about unrelated topics.

Develop A Community Around Your Business

Turning your customers into brand cheerleaders takes time, but not a significant financial investment. You need to create compelling content, distribute that connect across your social networks, and offer a venue for your customers to engage with that content. Here’s how you do it:

Have a Blog on Your Company Website: Write about exciting trends in your industry, anecdotes from your daily business life, upcoming contests, and editorials about life in general. Contribute in-depth articles that convey your love of what you do without hitting your readers over the head with overt selling points. Include photos that show your business, and your smiling face, in action.

Distribute Content Over Social Media: Tweet about your blog content. Add your blog posts to your company’s Facebook page. Check back on your posts at least twice a day to gauge sharing and level of interest.

Encourage Comments and Visitor Interaction: Allow users to comment on blog posts on your site as well as through social media. Respond to anyone who asks a question and always keep the conversation as positive as possible. Find the right communities for your content and engage with them.

Know The Right Days to Post Content

Creating a community requires more than simply posting to your blog once per week. You need to curate your content and develop a readership through a visible digital presence. Visitors need to know that you’re available to them, and that you care about their opinions. As your readership grows, so will curiosity and interest in your brand and products.

People engage with content — blogs, news articles, etc. — in varying amounts depending on the day of the week. The strongest days for posting content are usually Tuesdays and Thursdays. The weekends, including Friday, are usually the worst for interaction. Choose a schedule that works best for your business and stick to it so your visitors know when to count on seeing new posts.

Offer Discounts to New Customers

You know the bare minimum price you need to sell products at to break even. Try leveraging your growing social media following by offering an at-cost discount to first-time customers to get them to try your items. Don’t incentivize likes to your Facebook page to get the lower price — that will violate Facebook terms of service — and don’t exchange price breaks for more followers. That strategy is the “turn and burn” customer model and you’re looking to build a longer relationship by creating brand cheerleaders or ambassadors.

Disrupt the Market Through Video

If you have a smartphone, you have access to a host of video apps that turn your HD camera into its own movie studio. Leverage your existing tech to create videos that show your products in ways that take new angles on boring verticals. Focus on humor and above all keep it brief — 6 seconds or less is online gold for Vine. If you’re posting to YouTube, the maximum video length that new viewers may sit through tops out at about five minutes. Promote this content just like your online blog and other social media efforts.

Maximize The Content You Create

Writing blog posts and creating great videos that showcase your company takes time. If you outsource creation, the costs associated can eat into your revenue stream. Why not get the most out of your efforts and cut the cash output? Repurpose that content into as many channels as possible. Clever lines from an article can turn into a slogan or campaign copy. A snappy six-second video on Vine can turn into a commercial. Save your rejected posts and brand logos for future posts.

Focus on Opportunities and Not Sales

Paying more attention to revenue than opportunities to earn revenue misses the entire point of marketing on a budget. Every follower on Twitter, like on Facebook, or subscriber to your company’s YouTube channel is a chance for your business to earn real dollars now or in the future. Check the value of the opportunities generated against your revenue and adjust your strategies to increase conversion. Ask your customers and brand fans what they like and don’t like about your products. They won’t hold back, if you approach them asking for their honest opinions.

Give it Away for Free

You’re scared, but it works. Promote a free giveaway of your product or service across all your digital and offline channels. Create a sign-up system where everyone who wants to give an email address can get a free trial of your service or a no-cost sample of your product. You give people a chance to experience what your business has to offer and you get contact info to use for future marketing efforts.

Stick to your marketing schedule. Put out content that people want to engage with and make sure you’re not invisible to your customers. Do that and you won’t ever go broke trying to buy Super Bowl ad time.